I used to pull photos out of Facebook by downloading them individually. But it would be crazy to download thousands of photos and then upload all of them to Google Photos.

Luckily, there’s an easier way.

Getting Your Photos Out of Facebook

There’s an easy but not intuitive way to get your photos out of Facebook.

First, go to the settings area of Facebook.

In the settings tab, there’s an option to download all your Facebook data.

When you click on the link, it spends some time creating a .zip file. After the zip file finishes building, you’ll get an email.

The file itself will take a while to download. Mine was 70 megabytes (as a zipped file).

Getting the Pictures into Google Photos

The first step to getting these photos into Google Photos is unzipping the zip file. It’ll create a file with multiple folders. One will be called Photos.

You can literally drag and drop this folder into Google Photos and it will sync.

Make sure you unzip the file before doing this. It will look like you can drop the folder in Google Photos when it’s zipped, but nothing will actually sync.

What to Do Next

Wait. The photos will take a long time to get indexed by Google. So even though you’ll be able to see them in your albums, you won’t be able to search them.

I also recommend deleting all the Facebook files. It has every interaction you’ve ever had on Facebook in it. You could always download another set off Facebook, so it’s not worth leaving a record in a public place.